I’ve wanted a monome for a long time now, and this just makes it worse. So many neat things you can do with this device. If I was more confident with a soldering iron, I’d buy a kit and make one. They aren’t really *that* expensive.

Polygomé demonstration from stretta on Vimeo.

This has been out for a while, but I have been torn between the Korg padKONTROL and M-Audio’s Trigger Finger. I was looking at the Trigger Finger for DJing because it has faders and more assignable knobs… But now I’m thinking I can just keep using my UC-33 for levels and grab one of these for live drumming and sample triggering. It’s less knobs, but the ease of programming and the X-Y controls make it much more desirable to me.

Since I got into Ableton Live, I’ve really just been DJing with it, with some looping and effects and running more channels of audio than I was able to do with my traditional vinyl or CD setups. More and more though, I’m getting a little “bored” with just playing someone else’s music quite so much so I’m wanting to get more into production and live remixing again. I’m thinking the padKONTROL lends itself to that quite nicely. Would be great for live drumming, sample triggering and studio drum programming at the very least.

I just bought an Axiom 25 this summer to use as a main keyboard. It’s only 25 keys, but I’m really just getting started so I don’t need a full keyboard just yet. I could definitely use the X-Y controls and the nicer pads on the padKONTROL though. The Axiom 25 has pads, but they aren’t very nice.

Unfortunately though, all gear purchases are going to have to wait until after the holidays, which means I need to figure out how to get the pads on the Axiom to assign to another channel different from the keys. I’m pretty sure it does that… And maybe I can program my really old Kaoss Pad (I bought the first version, ages ago) to act as a simple X-Y control.